Inside LINK is a weekly column from our CEO, Lacy Starling. If you have questions you’d like Lacy to answer, email her at lacy@linknky.com.
Plenty of people told me when we were starting LINK that print is dead. Printing a newspaper, they said, would be a total resource drain, and would provide absolutely no return on investment.
We did it anyhow.
The difference, though, between LINK and the legacy papers that are currently eliminating publication days, or shutting down publications altogether, is that we didn’t create our print paper as a profit center. Other news organizations expected their papers to have enough advertising and subscription revenue to make a profit. When print subscriptions dwindled and fewer businesses wanted to advertise in the paper, the math stopped working and print editions no longer made sense.
We decided to take a different approach. Rather than treat the print edition as a source of profit, we decided to make it part of our mission.
In this highly fragmented time, when social media and search algorithms feed us the same kinds of content over and over, it is easy to get stuck in our own silos. We read news about the same topics, from the same news sources, over and over, and those feedback loops are incredibly hard to break.
NKY is no exception to this. When I lived in Union, I rarely knew what was going on in Covington, or Independence, or Wilder. And then, when I moved to Covington, I stopped knowing what was going on in Union. It was too hard to source information about other parts of NKY, and I eventually got used to my new silo.
Plus, without any consistent source of local news, most of NKY spent the last 15 years hearing plenty about Cincinnati, Frankfort, or national news, but had no idea what was going on 15 miles down the road in the next city or county.
The best way we could think of to fix that was to put the same information in the hands of EVERYONE in the community at the same time, regardless of whether it made money or not.
If everyone could read the same stories about the makeup of NKY, or about our tiny towns, or (in future issues) education, political issues, or other important topics, maybe we could encourage folks to get out of their silos and come together for important conversations.
That’s also why we don’t charge subscriptions. We don’t want anyone’s financial situation to determine whether they get to part of the conversation about NKY. If only people with enough disposable income to spend on a newspaper subscription get this information, we aren’t living up to our mission, either.
Don’t get me wrong – this commitment to unifying the community around meaningful stories every other month isn’t cheap. Just the postage to mail more than 164,000 newspapers is nearly $30,000 each time we print. Add printing, distribution, and graphic design costs, and the print edition is our single largest expense as an organization.
But we are willing to spend that money because we believe in the unifying power of a print product landing in everyone’s mailbox in the Metro. We think a community that can slow down for a second, look outside its silo, and dive into an issue is a community that will, eventually, come together to solve the big problems.
So this week, as you read the second issue of the LINK Reader, I would encourage you to think about all the other residents of NKY having that same experience. What stories do you think are meaningful for them, and what do you hope they’ll learn about your corner of NKY from our coverage?
